Below is a copy of an announcement regarding changes made to Oregon Health
Sciences University's CliniWeb database. The addition of PubMed links to the
database may be of special interest to you. Bill Hersh is CliniWeb's
originator. The idea for linking to PubMed and the search strategies employed
came from the library staff here.

To those interested in medical information retrieval and cross-language
information retrieval,

We would like to announce some significant new enhancements to CliniWeb, our
catalog of Web-based medical documents (Hersh et al., JAMIA, 3:273-280, 1996).
The unique features of CliniWeb are filtering for clinical provider-oriented
pages, individual page indexing with MeSH disease and anatomy terms, and display
of pages within a browsable MeSH hierarchy. Terms are selected using the
SAPHIRE UMLS Metathesaurus term-searching engine, which maps free text to
Metathesaurus concepts.

The first new feature of CliniWeb is the ability to find terms using the five
languages supported in the Metathesaurus: English, German, French, Spanish, and
Portuguese. This is an adaptation of SAPHIRE. It should be noted that while
SAPHIRE International can handle various foreign characters (e.g., umlauts,
accents), the output is in English-transliterated form, since this is what is
present in the Metathesaurus. SAPHIRE International also does not yet perform
functions like foreign-language stemming.

The second new feature of CliniWeb is a connection to PubMed, the free MEDLINE
system available from the National Library of Medicine. For each MeSH disease
term, you can link to a search of PubMed for review, therapy, diagnosis, or all
documents. At present, the searches are straightforward, but we are looking at
ways to make them more dynamic.

We are also developing a number of new automated maintenance features that will
help with the most difficult problem with CliniWeb, which is keeping its
database up to date. We also plan to add the MeSH "Chemicals & Drugs" tree.